What's not to love about a gritty, grainy film with a catchy theme that you'll find yourself humming while you watch people getting gunned down and dying horribly onscreen? I'm not kidding, that theme popped back into my head as I'm writing this, even though it's been awhile since I've seen the film, and I'm humming it right now. You've gotta love a movie that serves up its violence with style and likability.

Ahh John Carpenter. Much is made of his OTHER film, Halloween, because it's really famous... ok, he's made many famous films, but Halloween is probably his most well-known film, and consequently, people debate and discuss that film to death while this little action gem about a violent gang and a standoff that lasts all night and the criminals who have to join forces with the cops to stay alive often gets little recognition. That's a shame, too, because Assault on Precinct 13 has a brilliance that I think is often unfairly ignored (unless hollyweird is raping its script in order to produce a crappy remake that we won't discuss here). You see, in the 70s, Carpenter was part of a wave of filmmakers that made angry, violent little movies where people did despicable things like kill little girls in front of ice cream trucks, and audiences flocked to see these sleazy and reprehensible films because these movies showed what other films were too wholesome to show; a seedy, nasty undercurrent to every day life. Take Assault on Precinct 13, for instance, where indeed a little girl is killed in front of an ice cream truck because a violent street gang known as "Street Thunder" wants to get revenge on the city.

A bus transporting some violent prisoners from one penitentiary to another stops at the police station for medical assistance. The father of the murdered little girl flees to the police station in shock. The gang closes in on the station and a siege begins. What follows is a nasty little movie in which many likable characters get killed. Typically in Hollywood movies the likable characters survive, but this movie wasn't afraid to gun down women and little kids and anyone else who got in its way. This mean spiritedness makes it extra disturbing. At its heart, the movie is really a modern updating of the classic western (with a lawman aligning with an outlaw to stop a gang of other outlaws from shooting up a town) but when the violence of those film was taken out of the realm of horses and saloons and thrust into the inner city, people didn't want to see it. This movie tanked at the box office initially but was well-received in Europe where the modernization of a traditional American western tale was immediately lauded. Nowadays critics and filmgoers in the know tend to acknowledge that this movie is one of the best action films of the 70s, but it seems that everyone forgets that the unexpected violence and mean-spirited nature of the film made it unappetizing to viewers when it was first released. It appears that we're all more accepting these days of the wild and rebellious spirit of grindhouse classics like Assault on Precinct 13.

It's said that this movie's most famous scene, the death of the little girl, was cut from the film in order to get an R-rating and then reinstated into the film for its release, which I find both hilarious and indicative of the spirit of the rogue filmmakers who traipsed about through the 70s making the nasty grindhouse movies we know and love today. Give this movie a watch. It's literally a bloody good time.